A Gordian Knot - PMQs 19th November 2025

 “Order. I did not realise that you were all Scottish MPs!” cried the Speaker, calming the crowd as Sir Keir, celebrating Scotland’s 4-2 win over Denmark, added “Caledonian” to his repertoire of identities. Christian, free speech champion, patriot… whatever next? Benevolent technocrat and defender against chaos, maybe:

1. CONTROLLING IMMIGRATION

“On Monday, we introduced the largest overhaul of the asylum policy in modern times, restoring control and fairness, and creating safe and legal routes.”

The doughty Richard North dissolves that candyfloss with an analysis of what Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposals mean in practice including a fast-track system for rubber-boaters and HGV stowaways:

“Illegal immigrants who successfully achieve refugee status gain the advantage of being permitted to work or study here, without first having to go through the hoops of obtaining sponsors and applying for visas. Once established on this “work and study” route, they can bring their families in to join them.”

In a follow-up piece North illustrates how “legacy media, our politicians and even some of our political thought-leaders” fail to notice how the top card on the dealer’s deck is gettin’ a mite dusty even though “the Refugee Council is acknowledging that the flow of illegal immigrants will not be interrupted as the basis of its calculation assumes an average of 140,000 new entrants a year.”

There are those including MPs Rupert Lowe and Katie Lam who have called for illegals to be deported en masse. To those who would go further it has to be said that immigrants are not all the same. The other day I was speaking to a local British-born Asian who while ranting as we all do about Labour’s loss of economic control moved on unprompted to the immigration crisis. “I‘ve been working since I was eight,” he said. Our new, minority-rich “nation of shopkeepers” grafts long and hard while watching their taxes go to tale-spinning blow-ins from poor countries.

It’s not just ‘illegals.’ When new arrivals are able to set up a little business, often a sell-all shop, competitors’ profits are shaved even thinner. Mass immigration hits the earlier immigrants.

Watch for the rise of a new political class of financial and social conservatives who prioritise their God and family over layabouts, malingerers and beggars. We are heading for hard times and a fragmented demos.

What we really need is a government that gets a grip, instead of faking it.

2. ENERGY POLICY

The PM also spoke of his visit last Thursday to Anglesey where our first small modular reactor is to be built.

Possibly not soon enough, seeing yesterday’s announcement by ExxonMobil’s chairman that its Mossmorran plant in Scotland is to close in February; two of the factors he cited are HMG’s carbon taxes and its failure to exploit what President Trump has called our “treasure chest” of North Sea oil resources.

Re Mossmorran the PM later said to the Leader of the Opposition, “it is a difficult time for the workforce there, and we must focus on supporting them… It has been facing losses for the past five years.” Is it a coincidence that the Tories legislated for Net Zero in 2019? But remember also that Labour passed the Climate Change Act back in 2008.

3. ASSISTED SUICIDE

The first question came from the Tories’ Kit Malthouse who expressed concern about “manoeuvres outside this House” that “may be used to prevent Parliament from reaching a decision on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.”

Malthouse, “a co-sponsor of the Bill and… co-chair of the APPG for choice at the end of life” said “the Government are neutral on the Bill itself” and made it an issue of democracy instead. Starmer agreed on the neutrality, perhaps positioning himself in readiness for a public rejection of the Kill Bill and its erodable safeguards.

4. REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Next, Labour’s Jon Trickett deplored the regional economic inequality that he said was a legacy of the Conservatives and looked forward to next week’s Budget in which he hoped for “an announcement of massive investment in the north” and elsewhere. Sir Keir boasted “we have had a pay increase for the 3.5 million lowest-paid” and promised that “the Chancellor will deliver a Budget based on Labour values.”

This reshaping of the country’s industrial base sounds good but has its drawbacks. Birmingham has long been a casualty of high-minded top-down redesign by the Men from the Ministry as this informative article from Birmingham Dispatch shows. Following the Blitz it was decided that the city had to shrink and some of its industrial population be redistributed to other areas. A 1945 Act required an Industrial Development Certificate (IDC) to expand a plant beyond 5,000 square feet in “congested areas.” The Dispatch says

“… planning constraints, when combined with the temporary buoyancy of state-supported car manufacturing, created a hothouse effect. Wages soared and the price of land and housing skyrocketed. There was little incentive for young people locally to train or stay in education: a job was guaranteed.

“The combined impact was to destroy the diversity and variety of industry in the city as well as the close links between them, the clustering and ‘agglomeration effects’ as economists term them. The city’s economy was frozen in aspic, preventing new industries that would drive future growth (such as pharmaceuticals or aerospace) from setting up locally.”

This regulatory regime ended in the early 80s but by then Birmingham had become over-dependent on the motor vehicle industry and when that was hit by global developments we lacked resilience. So much of our cityscape now speaks of loss and decay and we have to be careful where we walk at night. Metal shutters, CCTV.

5. FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY

Most of the exchanges between Starmer and Badenoch were on our moribund economy and the tax decisions anticipated in the forthcoming Budget. Were income tax thresholds to remain frozen?

There must be a limit to taxing our way out of a slump. The poor have nothing yet the government is importing vast numbers of extra dependants. High earners and the wealthy are fleeing the country; the middle classes are wondering if they can somehow follow suit - Peter Hitchens thinks so.

Rupert Lowe MP is advocating a classic Conservative solution - slash taxes and the Welfare State. Will that be enough to sail through the headwinds of the West’s highest energy costs?

An alternative analysis comes from Professor Steve Keen, one of perhaps only twenty professional economists (out of 20,000 worldwide) who predicted the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. He says the driver then and in the Great Depression in the Thirties was debt - not public but private. When the banks have loaded up the people with debt it hits the capacity to spend more; the velocity of money drops and we enter a deflationary cycle. Keen (together with Richard Murphy, an accountant who seems to me worryingly sure of himself) maintains that governments can simply print more money to deal with challenges and rebuild. Both agree that the financial sector needs to be reined-in.

Something has to change, for Labour’s Robin Hood economics seem certain to fail.

6. DEVOLUTION - PULLING UP THE LADDER OF POWER

Reform’s Lee Anderson asked the PM if he would “guarantee that all the cancelled elections from this year and the proposed local elections for next year will go ahead in May 2026?”

Unfortunately Anderson has not the late Tam Dalyell’s knack of making his questions extra awkward with brevity of expression but even so the response was irrelevant blether, of which Anderson complained on Twitter.

The drive towards metro mayors is termed “devolution” by HMG but at the same time it is an “upvolution” drawing power away from the local council level. It is another case of fixing something that ain’t broke, or even breaking something that was fixed. It continues the Blairite strategy of smashing the power of Parliament and the voice of the people.

7. ISLAMOPHOBIA AND GOOD GOVERNANCE

Labour’s Afzal Khan asked Sir Keir to “outline the steps this Government will take to tackle the rising level of racism and xenophobia against Muslims in Britain.”

The PM said, “The increase in incidents must be addressed. It is why we are increasing funding to protect mosques and Muslim faith schools across the country. It is why we have announced a new fund to monitor anti-Muslim hatred and support victims, and we continue to work on the definition of anti-Muslim hatred.”

This is dealing with consequences rather than causes. The cause is weak government, and not only Labour’s. Our ruling establishment has to defend our liberal society with great firmness.

The inscription over the entrance to the Old Bailey reads “punish the wrongdoer and defend the children of the poor.” The thousands of victims of “grooming gangs” (which were/are largely but not exclusively Pakistani Muslim) have been failed and even now a public enquiry has yet to get underway.

The Labour Party has been tainted with its reluctance to grasp the nettle and pursue the wrongdoers without fear or favour; it has been more concerned not to lose votes - in the 2019 General Election 85% of Muslims supported Labour. The sexual abuse scandal has misled some people, wholly unreasonably but understandably, to tar all Muslims with the same brush. This evil crime wave and its enablers must be rooted out; justice must have only one tier.

But Islam is potentially a threat to the established order because taken “neat” it is an ideological system that is absolutist and does not recognise a distinction between religion and State power. Like Marxism and the Roman Catholicism of earlier times it is supranational and willing to pursue its objectives with large-scale violence.

It may be kept under control with effective intelligence-gathering and policing, but the fire will smoulder forever unless tackled on the level of ideas. It is not possible to argue with someone who insists that every word in his one Book is infallibly true, even when (as with the Meccan and Medinan verses) one part contradicts another. Islam has not yet had the critical revision that the Bible received from Christian theologians in the nineteenth century, but it is overdue.

It may be hugely upsetting for many to have the basis of their faith questioned but just as Christians can continue without being literalist about every tiny part of the Old and New Testaments so Muslims should be able to determine what are the valuable elements in their religious tradition, and how to live in peace with other neighbouring communities.

It’s that or let the fires build.

8. DRINK

Failing that two-pronged approach, we may take refuge in drink. A friend is having to replenish his stock of The Antiquary following Scotland’s football victory.

Looking ahead, Labour’s Torcuil Crichton asked for excise duties to be considered in the Budget, bearing in mind the World Cup final will be held in the MetLife stadium in New Jersey.

The PM said he would continue to discuss trade terms. If only he would give continuing consideration to other important matters.